Avere Launches FXT 4800 Cloud-Friendly Filer

Posted on March 06, 2014 By Pedro Hernandez

This week, the company launched the latest in its line of cloud-enabled filers, the FXT 4800 Edge Filer. Packing enhanced components, the system sticks to the company's "Edge-Core" strategy of optimizing application performance and file retrieval times by positioning the high-spec hardware in front of the NAS infrastructure, where it can pump data to users faster.

Avere employs an automated, hybrid approach to help improve file performance (NFSv3 and CIFS) over traditional, disk-based NAS setups. FXT filers use DRAM and NVRAM to boost reads and write speeds in addition to metadata management. Solid-state drives (SSDs) and SAS hard drives (HDDs) juggle active (hot) data along with files that are on the verge of being accessed (warm).

Avere debuted the cloud-enabled tech during last year's AWS re:Invent event in San Francisco. FlashCloud, "integrates legacy network-attached storage (NAS) with Amazon S3 and Glacier services into a single global namespace (GNS) that presents a unified view of all files via familiar NAS protocols," explained Rebecca Thompson, VP of Marketing for Avere in a blog post.

As the company's new flagship filer, the FXT 4800 is positioned to push those capabilities further.

Jeff Tabor, senior director of product marketing at Avere, described the FXT 4800 "as the next logical extension of our Avere 4000 series," in a company statement. Features include a newer, faster processor that "enables our customers to reach higher performance levels," he claimed, before adding that his company's "Edge-Core approach optimizes response time to users and enables centralizing storage for cost savings and simplified management."

SSD capacity has been bumped to 4.8 TB (versus 3 TB on the FXT 4500). The FXT 4800 also sports 144 GB DRAM and 2GB NVRAM. Two 10 GbE ports and a single GbE connection provide network connectivity. According to Avere, FXTs really prove their mettle on enterprise file workloads at scale.

"In a 50-node cluster, the FXT 4800 provides a high performance and high capacity tier for as many as 50 NAS and object-based Core filers with a total of 7.2TB DRAM, 240TB SSD, more than 110GB/sec throughput, and more than 3.6 million ops/sec performance," boasted the company.

The Avere FXT 4800 Edge Filer is available now. Prices start at $159,500.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at InfoStor. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.